Editor's Note

The Charge

If he's crazy, what does that make you?

Opening Statement

Legend has it that Ken Kesey despises director Milos Forman's film adaptation
of his most famous novel because it isn't faithful to the book's structure and
overall feel. How could it be? Kesey's novel is a decidedly internal affair,
telling Randle McMurphy's tumultuous story entirely from the skewed and
sometimes hallucinatory perspective of Chief, the outsized and supposedly
deaf-mute asylum inmate who becomes McMurphy's closest confidante. Forman's film
is purely external, eschewing foggy subjectivity for a cold, hard, unflinching
look at life in the nuthouse.

Facts of the Case

McMurphy (Jack Nicholson, Chinatown) is a con doing time for
statutory rape. Whether because of his eccentric ways or a calculated strategy
to escape the big house, he's transferred to a mental asylum. There he spends
his days in therapy with a group of voluntary inmates paralyzed by fear, social
awkwardness, and damaging pasts: an overbearing latent homosexual named Dale
Harding (William Redfield, Death Wish); a stunted, stuttering kid with a
history of self-harm named Billy Bibbit (Brad Dourif, The Lord of the Rings: The Two
Towers) ; squinty and addle-brained Martini (Danny DeVito, Batman Returns); explosive oddballs
Taber (Christopher Lloyd, Back to
the Future) and Fredrickson (Vincent Schiavelli, Tomorrow Never Dies); and the deeply
neurotic Cheswick (Sydney Lassick, Carrie).

At first, wiseacre McMurphy passes the time by pranking his fellow inmates
and winning their cigarettes away from them in poker games. In time, though, he
begins to recognize that the overbearing authority of martinet Nurse Mildred
Ratched (Louise Fletcher, Flowers in
the Attic) is keeping the men weak and dependent rather than curing them.
McMurphy turns his impish anti-authoritarianism toward Ratched and the asylum
staff as a way of drawing his buddies out of their shells, prodding them to
behave like human beings. As the struggle between McMurphy and Ratched
escalates, McMurphy finds an unexpected ally in one of the chronic, incurable
patients: Chief Bromden (Will Sampson, The Outlaw Josey Wales), a
towering Native American deaf-mute. But, wily and street-smart as he is, can
McMurphy beat Ratched while living inside the world she controls?

The Evidence

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's long and convoluted production
history is well-documented elsewhere, but I'll give you a tiny bit of
background. Kirk Douglas bought the film rights to Kesey's novel after having
played McMurphy in Dale Wasserman's Broadway adaptation of the book in the early
1960s (a little trivia: a very young Gene Wilder played Billy Bibbit in the
stage version). Douglas tried for a decade to turn the book into a film before
finally turning the rights over to his son Michael. Partnering with producer
Saul Zaentz, screenwriters Lawrence Hauben and Bo Goldman, and director Milos
Forman (Amadeus), Douglas was finally
able to get the film off the ground. All the struggle, effort, and delays were
worth it. Cuckoo's Nest was a movie waiting for its time to arrive, and
its wacked-out anti-hero spoke to the generation of the mid-1970s in a way he
didn't to that of the early 1960s. When the film finally hit theaters in 1975,
it raked in money, critical raves, and all the major category statues at that
year's Academy Awards.

Kesey's story is about the power of systems of authority to strip people of
their humanity without them even knowing they're being controlled. The concept
is personified in Nurse Ratched. Far from a monster in appearance, Ratched is a
soft-voiced matron who gently urges her patients towards healing and wholeness.
Presumably, she genuinely believes that she is doing them good. But the rigidity
of the clinical environment and the rules imposed on the patients are
dehumanizing. This becomes apparent when McMurphy begins coaxing the other
inmates into courtyard basketball games and petty gambling—banal
activities that nonetheless provide an environment for real social interaction.
The re-humanizing of the near catatonic Chief Bromden, for instance, begins at
the aforementioned basketball game when McMurphy moves him into position under
the basket and demands that he raise his hands to catch a pass and complete a
slam dunk. When Chief finally acquiesces, it sets off a series of escalating
interactions with McMurphy that draw the giant out of his shell, finally
culminating with one of the most mundane but memorable lines of dialogue in
movie history as the duo sits side-by-side in a hallway, awaiting electro-shock
therapy. McMurphy is dogged in his insistence that the other men quit kowtowing
to Ratched and the system and act like men instead of nuts. "You're no crazier
than the average asshole out walking around on the streets and that's it," he
tells them.

McMurphy's interactions with the other inmates work so profoundly as drama
and comedy because of Milos Forman's commitment to verisimilitude. In the
commentary track included on this disc, he talks about casting unknown actors to
play against Nicholson (many, such as DeVito, Dourif, and Christopher Lloyd,
went on to greater fame but none were recognizable at the time) and having them
shadow inmates at a real mental institution so that they could depict various
mental illnesses as truthfully as possible. The results are powerful, human, and
full of pathos and comedy. Not for a second do any of the actors appear to be
acting. They are entirely convincing. And the men's raw vulnerability resonated
more in an exhausted, frustrated American society nearing the end of the Vietnam
War than it possibly could have in the quieter political times during which the
novel was written. Kesey's tale of paranoia and the almost invisible inhumanity
of systems of authority was prescient.

The revelatory performance in the film is, of course, Louise Fletcher's. For
the film's challenging balance of drama and comedy to work, the actress playing
Ratched had to exude an emotionally detached cold interior beneath a warm
exterior. She had to be half mom, half Nazi she-bitch. And she had to hold her
own against the dynamism of Nicholson's charismatic screen presence in full
preening spectacle. Fletcher delivered on all of the above so thoroughly that
she earned herself a much-deserved Best Actress Oscar. Over 30 years down the
road, her thespian sparring with Nicholson is still astounding to watch.
Palpable tension ripples through the movie whenever the two interact and carries
over into scenes in which they don't. The greatest compliment that I can give
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is that it is the most side-splittingly
funny tragedy in modern American film. Milos Forman and all of the actors
contributed mightily to that union of opposites, but it was Fletcher and
Nicholson at the center of the maelstrom. Their vicious shared energy was a
horrifying and hilarious beacon leading the other actors to the greatest
performances in many of their careers.

Warner Bros. has known how to handle their catalogue titles on DVD since the
early days of the format and they appear to know how to handle them on Blu-ray
as well. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest's 1080p VC-1 transfer looks
gorgeous. The high definition master was created with sensitivity toward
handling a 30-year-old celluloid source. The Two-Disc Special Edition DVD of
Cuckoo's Nest released a few years ago was pleasing to the eye, but the
Blu-ray ups the ante with more accurate colors, deeper blacks, brighter whites,
and sharper detail. Grain is fine and controlled, but has enough presence that
you feel like you're watching film. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler lit and the
shot Cuckoo's Nest to reinforce Forman's almost documentary realism. The
image looks pristine and beautiful without sacrificing any of Wexler's work to
digital noise reduction or other tomfoolery.

The film's original monaural analog soundtrack is cramped and limited by
nature. Warner's Dolby 5.1 presentation of the source is clean and free from
age-related flaws, but otherwise unremarkable. Dialogue is always discernible,
and Jack Nitzsche's Theremin-tinged score sounds as good as the original
recording allows. You won't be using One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to
demo your home theater's sound system for your friends, but Warner's done a fine
job restoring a no-frills source. In addition to the English-language surround
track, there are five single-channel mono dubs and a baker's dozen worth of
subtitles in various languages (not including a few tracks for the hearing
impaired).

Supplements are identical to those found on the previous two-disc DVD with
the addition of a 38-page book of liner notes included in the stylish DigiBook
case. Forman and producers Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz provide a decent
feature-length audio commentary. In terms of substance, the track is excellent.
It provides a wealth of information about the film's production. Style-wise, the
track is lacking. Cobbled together from separate recordings of each of the
participants, there are no introductions, no warm banter, and no laughs. It's
all relatively dry business.

There is also a decent 30-minute making-of documentary as well as a
collection of deleted scenes. The film's theatrical trailer is also archived on
the disc.

Closing Statement

If someone asked me what the big deal was about the New Hollywood film
movement in America during the late '60s and pre-Star Wars '70s, One
Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest would be one of the first movies I'd recommend
as a point of explanation. Simply put, it's a great movie made during an
important period of cinema history, and it exemplifies everything about why the
New Hollywood mattered and continues to matter.

The Verdict

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is as innocent as Randle P. McMurphy.
She was fifteen years old going on thirty-five, Doc.

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